Friday, Oct 18, 2013
As video games become more cinematic in scope, style and storytelling techniques, as films based on games and games based on films appear, the line between the two can become blurred.
David Cage is, for many, a pioneer in this grey area. His most recent game — Beyond: Two Souls — uses full body and face capture of Hollywood stars Willem Defoe and Ellen Page to create digital versions of them and their acting. The pair take a movie-style star billing on the game’s case.
The methods Cage has used capture more nuances of the actors’ skills than have been seen before in a game. This is not voice over and animation; it is acting digitised. Along the way, Cage eschews many notable video game tropes: there is no “game over” instead there are 23 different endings to the game, depending on player choices.
Cage is not, he says, a frustrated movie-maker, but nor does he describe himself as a game designer. He regards himself as an interactive storyteller.
“I created my first video game — Omikron: The Nomad Soul — and it was really a video game based on the paradigms of video games. You had violent actions that you could play in loop, like many video games out there.
“And I realised that many people were absolutely not interested in this when I started talking about what I was doing with my parents, for example, or my grandparents. We could talk about the films that we liked or books that we liked or TV series that we liked, but when we came to video games it was, ‘Hmm, thanks, but we’re not interested.’
“And I really wondered why they were not interested and the answers were always the same: ‘Oh, it’s too difficult to play’, ‘I don’t have time’ and ‘I’m not interested in monsters and shooting at things for hours.’ That was basically the feedback I got.
“I thought, OK, that’s sort of an answer that makes sense and I thought, OK, what kind of experience could I create that would be different. And I started thinking about storytelling and interactive storytelling at a time when people thought that it was impossible, that interactivity and storytelling were two things that could not go together.
“And I thought maybe I could make this work, because if I can tell a story that will be truly attractive then more people would be interested in the experience and then I could create the type of emotions that I’m looking for, not just focus on adrenaline and stress and tension and frustration like most games out there, but try to structure more on empathy, on sadness, on all these different emotions that you don’t really find in games.”
Since the first Omikron game, Cage’s career has been a conscious effort to capture these emotions and how to immerse a player in the story he’s trying to tell. This is the reason for his dislike of what he calls “game over” events, which he regards as a failure on the part of the designer.
But technology is also a limiting factor. Cage’s studio, Quantic Dreams, has created its own motion capture studio to help realise Cage’s visions. For Beyond: Two Souls, Page and Defoe wore 99 motion capture points on their faces alone. Additional motion capture points on their bodies allowed to act as they would on a set — and, in fact, Cage’s firm. Quantic Dreams, built them primitive sets to act in, which would later be digitised in 3D.
Cage says there are three key factors to getting emotional content into games: lighting, full body and facial motion capture taken at the same time, and a character’s eyes.
Quantic Dreams have even found a way to motion capture eye movement by placing capture points along an actor’s lower eyelid.
Beyond: Two Souls is available now for the PlayStation 3.
By Andy Staples, Editor - Universal Copy Desk
Gulf News 2013. All rights reserved.
